BONIAN SPACE is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Twilight Melts on the Book Spines by artist CHEN Shaorong, from April 12 to May 11, 2025. Curated by WANG Yaoli, the exhibition features over twenty recent oil paintings by the artist. The works continue the characteristics of surrealist painting, with CHEN excelling in arranging and transforming everyday objects through nonlinear narratives. She constructs fictional spaces with immense imaginative potential by evoking a peculiar yet familiar sense of contradiction.
Chen Shaorong's practice is rooted in figurative painting. Her profound focus on the subconscious, imagination, and nonlinear logic lends her work a unique visual language that transcends the boundaries of reality. In her new series, "paper objects" have become a central medium of expression. The highly malleable nature of paper—capable of being folded, crumpled, cut, or torn—offers her work the potential to present planar and three-dimensional effects. Fascinated by the transformative properties of paper, she explores its qualities to redesign and manipulate the subjects in her works freely. For instance, in the work Psychological Eye (2024), she skillfully crafts the classic image of a "man with a hat" in a vividly sculptural manner through the technique of "creating" paper sculptures.
Rather than a realistic reproduction of the everyday, she prefers to present life more intriguingly, thereby granting the "ordinary" a broader space for multiple interpretations. Guided by intuition and emotion, she reprocesses "objects" in an irrational manner. The subconscious drives this process, and its outcome is the visual representation of human psychological schemas.
For example, in many of her works, the bodies of "paper figures" or familiar objects (such as cabinets, tables, and chandeliers) are often deliberately deformed or alienated, making their original physical properties appear ambiguous in the composition. At the same time, she tends to use bright and highly contrasting colors. These complex and conflicting hues effectively highlight the distinctions between objects. A faint light source, defying logical realism, illuminates a dim room, while paper cards adorned with symbolic and metaphorical patterns add a layer of enigmatic implication to her works.
CHEN Shaorong consistently strives for a "figurative but not literal expression," positioning her works at the intersection of reality and poetry. In The Missing and the Genius (2024), three "paper figures" holding playing cards and standing on a dining table seem to be both guests enjoying post-meal entertainment and musicians forming a trio on stage. As viewers, are we their audience or their fellow players? The answer remains open-ended. CHEN's paintings always engage with a profound exploration of the way of "seeing," whether it is how she perceives the world or how we, through her works, discover alternative perspectives to experience our surroundings. Infused with a surrealist visual language, her paintings reflect on human nature and desire, while also allowing us to find unique resonances with time, space, memory, and existence.
